Astronauts
aboard the International Space Station welcomed the arrival of a fresh cargo
ship early Tuesday after a flawless automated docking by the incoming
spacecraft.
The Russian-built
Progress 25 supply ship arrived right on time at 1:10 a.m. EDT (0510 GMT),
guiding itself to a berth at the aft end of the station's Zvezda service module
as both spacecraft passed 220 miles (354 kilometers) above the northeast coast
of Australia, NASA officials said.
"Congratulations on a successful
docking," Russian ISS flight controllers told the station's three-astronaut
Expedition 15 crew.
Inside the
orbital laboratory, Expedition 15 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin stood at the
ready to take remote control of the arriving cargo ship should its autonomous
docking plan encounter a glitch. But the spacecraft remained on target after a
three-day spaceflight that began with a late
Friday launch (Eastern Time) from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur
Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Progress 25
is laden with more than 2.5 tons of fresh supplies for the ISS crew. Tucked
among that 5,125 pounds (2,324 kilograms) of cargo are about 100 pounds (45
kilograms) of air, 925 pounds (419 kilograms) of water, and 3,042 pounds (1,379
kilograms) of dry supplies that range from new equipment and spare parts to
clothing for NASA
astronaut Clayton Anderson, an Expedition 15 crewmember slated to launch
towards the ISS aboard a NASA shuttle next month, the space agency said.
Russia's Interfax
News Agency reported that a batch of 50 snails were also riding to the ISS
aboard Progress 25 as part of a Russian Federal Space Agency experiment to study
tissue regeneration in microgravity.
Yurchikhin
and Expedition 15 flight engineers Oleg Kotov and Sunita Williams are slated to
begin unloading the new cargo ship at about 6:00 a.m. EDT (1000 GMT), NASA
said.
Progress 25's
successful Tuesday docking brings raises the station's total number of visiting
spacecraft to three. The unmanned Progress 24 cargo ship remains moored to the
station's Pirs docking compartment while the Soyuz TMA-10 spacecraft that
ferried Yurchikhin and Kotov to the ISS last month is docked at an Earth-facing
port on the orbital laboratory's Russian-built Zarya control module.
advertisement
